Industrial relations reform aims for site deals

Press, 26 July 1986, Page 8

Industrial relations reform aims for site deals

By PATRICIA HERBERT in Wellington

Incentives to encourage plant-based wage deals will be a big tbeme in reforms to emerge from the Green Paper review of industrial relations. Indications are that reforms will be encouraged by two means: • Giving workers a choice as to which union should represent them: a move that would permit unions to compete for members, and should cut down the number of unions involved in a single workplace. • Dislodging workers covered by secondary agreements from the award.

The motive behind this second proposal is apparent in the exceptions proposed to it. The most important of these is that composite agreements would be exempt. These were provided for in the Government’s wage-fixing legislation of 1984 but the response has been disappointing. They were envisaged as a way of encouraging site or industry bargaining and allow workers and employers to negotiate enter-prise-based agreements. Alternatively, unions will be able to keep those workers covered at second tier in the award by introducing a pass-on

clause: an undertaking that in future paid rates will be pegged to award rates.

Only if these options are rejected will the deletion provision take effect, in which case those workers with secondary agreements will be cited as not being party to the award.

Most unions will try to avoid this as a means of safe-guarding the quality of protection that national awards give. This is because secondary bargaining tends to be the preserve of those workers with most industrial leverage, and the unions are anxious to keep them in the system as they need their muscle at the negotiating table.

The Government faces a mass of conflicting pressures when it attempts to reform awards, not least because the Labour Party’s manifesto at the last General Election pledged not only to maintain the award structure but to strengthen it. Against this is increasing employer pressure to divorce secondary agreements from awards, to prevent the leap-frogging which now occurs as increases at one level are fed through to the other and then fed back again. The Green Paper signals that the reforms

would focus on sorting out this relationship. It poses the question:

“Should . second-tier agreements be complete codes of employment which replace awards? If so, should employers be required to provide unions with information on ability to pay?” According to reliable sources, these decisions have now been taken by the review working party: a high-powered group comprising the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Palmer; the Minister of Labour, Mr Rodger; his under-secretary, Mr E. E. Isbey; the associate Minister of Finance, Mr Prebble; the chairman of the Parliamentary select committee on labour and education, Mr F. M. Gerbic; and the chairperson of the Caucus industrial relations sub-committee, Ms Fran Wilde.

Their recommendations will be put to the Cabinet, which is confidently expected to approve them. Whether the Caucus does, remains to be seen.

The unions are already mounting an intensive lobbying campaign • in defence of their bottom line.

The secretary of the Distribution Workers Federation, Mr Rob Campbell, spelt out the limits of union tolerance in a recent speech.

“The progressive forces in unions accept the need for change.” he said. “We accept the need to build more effective structures to deliver collective bargaining and other union services.

"But we will fight bitterly any move which reduces or restricts our ability to protect all workers from the problems they face as workers,” said Mr Campbell.

“This makes a fair national award system the fundamental point of resistance. Even those of us who are pragmatists on other economic issues will not carry this through to our ability to deliver universal services to a universal membership. “That is a political bedrock for the unions.”

Mr Campbell declined to comment on the matter yesterday but of all unionists he would be the most vulnerable should the Government’s decisions prove unacceptable to the union movement. This is because he led the truce on the economy as a trade-off for protecting the unions’ base demands. He announced the new policy in April, saying there seemed little practical value in continuing to take a negative position to the Government’s economic policies. “Rather, we need to

develop some positive positions which are capable of protecting our members’ interests,” he said.

The Engineers Union and the Auckland Trades Council have so far dominated the public campaign in defence of the national award system, but others are working just as assiduously behind the scenes.

Mr Rex Jones, the secretary of the Engineers’ Union, said yesterday that 29 per cent of the 38,173 workers in the metal trades award were also covered at second tier, and that to dislodge them from the award would cause enormous instability.

He warned the Government that the union movement would not sit by and watch it “tear the national award system to pieces.” “They think there is no bottom line and that we are so impotent we will do nothing about it. That is wrong. There, is a bottom line: the retention of national awards and the registration system,” said Mr Jones. His second reference was to the monopoly right the law now gives unions to represent workers in particular occupations; a right that would go if workers were given a choice of unions.